Christopher Nolan proposed in The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”
I don’t think that this is a natural progression – hero to villain and it becomes more and more clearer with the suicide of the billionaire Siddhatha hedge. I didn’t think I would be writing about current events, but it seems unjust to write about anything else other than the recent events because if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past than history is bound to repeat itself.
Long before Mark Zuckerberg, Larry page, Jeff Bezos became our aspirations our local boy, Siddhartha hedge was our hero. You would be able to appreciate if you spent your teenage in namma Bengaluru.
Café Coffee Day was not just a placed of overpriced coffee, it was a meeting place where art met intellect, thousands of writers, lone-wolves, script writers, couples in love, couples in despair all found a respite.
Then with such an iconic past & a seemingly stellar future what went wrong?
There have been many तर्क वितर्क presented by the learned, speculative, spectators. I’m not going to add any more of speculation, but I would like to see the bigger picture which is
WHY DO GIANTS FALL?
Take any ancient story for that matter, be it David vs Goliath, Ram vs Kumbhakaran, Krishna vs Putana, Krishna vs Bakasura, we paint the Giants, the big rich guys as demons, as villains, so it becomes easier to not feel empathy for them. I’m not comparing Siddhartha to these demons, but take a minute to think about this, he was a Giant so to speak, then how did stress or fear get the better of him? How did he get defeated?
There is an interesting theory that during the course of becoming BIG, giants develop this rare condition that causes them to lose their eyesight, as a result of which they lose the ability to appreciate the finer details of the world around them.
In this horse race of growing big, growing fast, we forget that it comes with a cost, a cost of poor sight, you start seeing the bigger picture, but finer details become blurry.
This fast pace of “growth”, paves way to the hyperloop way of life making it unstable, unsustainable nuclear disaster waiting to happen. You see the real reason Giants fail is because they are weaker than we comprehend, they are more susceptible to bad judgement, because all they have is just an illusion of power, of strength but really, they are blind to their surroundings, if anything being BIG exposes their vulnerability even wider.
It is wise to remember that the higher you go, the more abstract the world becomes, you gain newer perspectives, but lose the foothold of reality.
It is true that our education, our “city-life”, this “modern” culture hasn’t equipped us to deal with stress, mental health, fatigue & sometimes the only solution we see is the big finale full-stop “.”
To conclude,
With great power comes great responsibility & greater vulnerability
Grazia &Salute,
Sonam Powar
Grazia & Salute 